"You've probably driven highways lined by trees, then pulled over to look around, only to discover that just like in old westerns, where false fronts hid the absence of real stores, you've been sold a bill of goods: a few yards of trees separate the road from yet more clearcuts. This fringe of trees, which reveals recognition on the part of timber corporations and government agencies that industrial forestry requires public deception, is common enough to have been given a name: the beauty strip...
Deforestation has long been surrounded by a bodyguard of lies... Clearcuts become "temporary meadows" and "mimic natural disturbances." Clearcutting is called "even age management," or mechanical fire suppression. Leaving a few trees in the middle of a clearcut is described as "selective cutting." Ancient trees are called "decadent," in the hopes that there will be less outcry over the loss of something already decaying than over the loss of something that was born long before our civilization and its war against nature. Old-growth forest is called a "biological desert," despite extensive scientific research showing that natural forests provided habitat for most of the worlds threatened species."
~Derrick Jensen & George Draffan,
Strangely Like War: the Global Assault on Forests |
